February 2023: North Country: A Pedagogical Almanac by Carolyn Dekker

Black Lawrence Press

Pre-order a copy of this amazing forthcoming work of creative non-fiction here!

from the site–

North Country: A Pedagogical Almanac is a memoir-in-essays about teaching and family life in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The book follows the cycle of seasons in this remote and beautiful place by the waters of Lake Superior during the years in which the author finds a place there. It’s also a look at higher education on the razor’s edge at a tiny and struggling liberal arts college. Above all, the memoir is about a life lived alongside books and what they might teach us about how to love, parent, mentor, and care for others.

from yours truly–

North Country is layered with celluloid universes where figures from Lord Byron to Naomi Alderman reside, each vignette a breathtaking tour of place and time grounded in the Upper Peninsula. In this “pedagogical almanac,” Carolyn Dekker asks us to interrogate the plight of first-generation college students, see that socioeconomic status separates the cowboy from the equestrian, and feel the beauty in blue collar work. Her discomfort in “our need to be inserted as eyewitnesses,” rockets this construction worker’s daughter turned professor from Atwoodian musings to bailing young mothers out of jail—and teaches education as lifelong activism.

—Kasey Perkins, author of When the Dead Get Mail